“SMALLMAN” by Mariel Brown now available on Studio Anansi

“SMALLMAN: THE WORLD MY FATHER MADE,” a film about the lives we make when our dreams don’t come true, by Mariel Brown, made its world premiere at the 2013 Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival. Since then, the film also screened at, The People’s Film Festival (NYC), Pan African Film Festival (Los Angeles), Black Harvest Film Festival (Chicago), and the Caribbean Tales International Film Festival (Toronto), where it won the award for best short film. It was also first picked up for distribution, by AfropopTv.

SynopsisJohn Ambrose Kenwyn Rawlins was an ordinary man of modest means. He was a great father, grandfather and husband; an obedient public servant. Yet the most vivid part of his life was lived in was a small workshop beneath his house. In there, at the end of his workday, he made things. From simple push toys to elaborate 1/16th scale waterline battle ship models and dockyards, miniature furniture and dolls houses, he painstakingly constructed everything from scratch, sometimes spending upwards of a year on a single model. Smallman is an exploration of the worlds both real and imagined that Kenwyn Rawlins made, as told by his son Richard.

Watch the Film:

Smallman: The World My Father Made

Mariel Brown is an award-winning documentary director and founder of the creative and production companies SAVANT Ltd and SAVANT Films. Mariel has written features for various Caribbean magazines; in particular she writes about writers and artists. Her documentary films have been screened on television at festivals and special events around the world, most recently the Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) and on afropop.tv – a web-based platform run by the US-based National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC). Two of Mariel’s films were picked up for traditional distribution and her work has been reviewed in publications such as Filmmaker Magazine,Wasafiri and The Caribbean Review of Books.